


I Could Not Find Her On My Map

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 22:59:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The sea licks against their cabin windows and pitches the ship like a child’s ball, and Preston Moray clings to her and whispers promises he can’t possibly keep into her oil-black hair." Vera Moray receives offers and adoration from any man she wants, and her husband will take her to any corner of the Isles she desires. It is not enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Could Not Find Her On My Map

The globe is old, yellowed. The skin of the islands and oceans is paper under a thin coat of lacquer, and it seems as fragile as the shell of an egg under his hands.

They are an gentleman explorer’s hands. Smooth, tanned, darkened by a sun the likes of which Dunwall rarely sees. There are all the proper calluses on the fingers of his right hand that come from pens, journals, field notes, acceptable things. There are improper calluses on his palms. Vera cannot see them, but she knows they are there. They come from ship-ropes and swords. They come from things that are dangerous.

Lord Preston Moray flicks his wrist, and the world makes a soft sound as it spins and spins and spins, and his hands pass their shadow over the shores and the sea. “Choose,” he begs her. “I’ll take you to ivy-wreathed abbeys in Morley that no Gristol man has seen for centuries. I’ll take you to a glacier in Tyvia that’s carved from glass, where the snow looks like diamonds. We’ll go wherever you want to go. Dunwall is too small for you. Marry me and I’ll give you the world.”

Vera smiles. The globe stops spinning as she kisses him, his hands splayed flat and helpless. Her own do not touch his. Her hands slide off, and curve over the fragile globe and whatever axis within it that keeps it spinning, and the ragged coastlines of Pandyssia fit against the lifelines on her palms. The sea, the sketched-out shores as shaky as waves, the _here there be madness_.

*****

_“Marry me,” he says, “and I’ll give you all the Empire.”_

_Euhorn Kaldwin is young and smiling. He had been a sailor and soldier before the Tower steps ran red and lifted him to the throne, and he holds himself ramrod-stiff. The clothes of an Emperor are stiff upon him, as well. Severe. The epaulets on his coat glitter gold. His hair is gold as well. He is the rising sun in the middle of the room, a glorious new dynasty, and every eye is upon him._

_This means that every eye is upon Vera, as well. She smiles, tilts her head, fusses with the velvet drape of her shawl so that it falls just so against the line of her collarbone. “Which part of the Empire, exactly?” she asks. “The narrow slice that I can see from your bedroom window? Is that all?”_

_They dance. It is a Morley dance. She can hear generals and admirals murmuring in disapproval from the sidelines. The young Emperor likes their disapproval, grows brighter from it, feeds upon it. Vera circles around him, one hand caught in his, as he spins her forward and back like a child’s kite upon a string. In the corners of her eyes she can see the aristocracy, watching. Highborn ladies with murder on their faces. Sniveling Parliament rats who will fawn and hang upon Euhorn’s every move. His Royal Protector, a shadow, never quite in the center of Vera’s vision, flitting around the edges of the crowd with sword in  hand and watching, judging, always watching._

_When she smiles, white teeth, it’s a challenge to the entire room. It’s a challenge to the man before her who blazes bright as a battlefield sun._

_“Marry me,” he begs her, again, before the night is out. “And you’ll be Empress. I’ll give you – ”_

_“Heirs,” she supplies. “Adoration. Assassination attempts. Constant scrutiny. My own wing of the tower that you’ll slowly cease to visit. Am I missing anything?”_

_Euhorn walks her out on the tower balcony, slides his hands about her waist as they stand before the view of the sea and the scores and scores of ships that are waiting there, new-sewed blue Kaldwin banners flying high. It is an army of them. They are glorious. They will conquer at his command. “This,” he says._

_“This is a harbor,” Vera answers dryly. “It’s safe. The ships are anchored. What makes you think I would want this?”_

*****

Preston takes her to Serkonos, first. He shows her beaches of pure white sand speckled by shells of cream and red and royal purple. He shows her cities where anything and everything can be bought – spices, fruits, women, men, magic and wine. By day, they take a carriage to the rolling hills and walk through rows upon rows of orange and lemon trees. By night, the white curtains on their window blow in the warm breeze, and their sheets are white as well.

Preston Moray sleeps late. Vera Moray rises early. She stands in the window and drinks the coffee that the maid brings. It’s black. If she were home in Gristol, it would be far, far too black and strong for a well-born married woman to drink.

If they were in Gristol, Preston’s kisses would be tepid and proper.

They are not in Gristol.

She learns this, gloriously, the day they take a boat to a small island west of Cullero. Their guide spends an hour carefully piloting them through the shoals and finding a place to land upon the rocky shore. Another hour up a twisting path and they arrive at a ruin, deep in the trees, red stone and crumbling pillars. Whalebones. Odd inscriptions, carved circles, strange half-eroded writing on the walls.

“See the view?” Preston says. He takes Vera’s hand, turns her, demonstrates how if she stands just _so_ she commands a perfect view of the entire sea. “This was a lighthouse for pirates and witches who worshipped the Outsider. The Academy thinks that they used sites like this to perform rituals that controlled the fog so that only the proper ships could see the lights…”

He drops his journal when he pulls it out to take notes, and Vera laughs and snatches it away. Runs up crumbling steps deeper into the ruin. Here, the fallen red stones are stained black. “Look,” Preston calls, excitement plain in his voice, “you can see where they lit the fires – ”

“Is that all you see?” Vera challenges.

Preston laughs. He takes his journal from her and backs her against a tilted pillar. His hands find the buttons of her safari jacket, and her hair comes askew and loose as her head falls back against the stone. When he kisses at her neck, there is a fine layer of red dust over her skin.

It is not that he sees _her_. It is that he sees her overlayed upon the ruins, against a backdrop of things that are mysterious and unexplored and forbidden, and these things enhance those qualities in herself. The Serkonan sun heightens the darkness of her eyes. The cries of gulls heighten hers. Her back scrapes against the pillar, and Vera closes her eyes and doesn’t care if it catches and rips upon her jacket; Preston has given her the world, she can buy another. She doesn’t care if the stone is rough on her skin. There are runes on its surface, and in their room back in Cullero she will undress and twist in the mirror in the hope that they’re still there, impressed and bruised upon her back. A mark.

*****

_Emperor Euhorn Kaldwin’s hair is gold. The color of badges on a uniform, the color of the dawn. Lord Nathan Boyle’s is gold as well, but his reminds Vera of money. So much of it passes through his hands, after all. They must surely smell of it. He is clever, keeps it circulating, gives much of it away so that the other lords and ladies say that he is kind, charitable, a good man._

_Vera is sick of good men. Good men are not romantic. Good men look at her and think of children, of songbirds in cages, of the rooms in their house that she might take over and bedeck with frills and make hers and never leave._

_The rumors say that Nathan Boyle is this kind of good man._

_It is not the first time they’ve been wrong._

_He does not ask her “marry me.” He simply steps up behind her in the garden one evening, sweeps his hand around her neck, and Vera feels something cool and  heavy settle against her pulse. “This is for you.”_

_It is a cameo. The outline of a woman with the empty Void within. It is beautiful. Vera draws in a startled breath, drags her nail along the woman’s lips. “This is yours.”_

_“It’s been in the Boyle family for generations,” explains Nathan. He shifts from foot to foot. “I thought – I thought it looked like you.”_

_“Clever man,” she chuckles. “You’d never let this leave the family.”_

_“No.” He shrugs. Loose, confident. “Think of it as a business proposition,” he says. “With the war, it would be stupid to leave me as sole owner of the Boyle mines while I’m off at sea. I need a partner. Preferably one who I can share all my personal secrets with, as well. I need a wife who can stand at my side and ruin me if I deserve it.”_

_“A business proposition?” Vera echoes. There’s laughter tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Equality? How boring.”_

_She unclasps the cameo from her neck and tosses it back to him. He catches it one-handed, looks at it, looks at her, sighs. “No?”_

_There’s no bitterness in his voice. It’s almost enough to make her reconsider. Vera curtsies. “I hope your eventual wife gives you nothing but sons, Lord Boyle,” she says, honestly. “If your daughters are half as bold as you, Dunwall won’t know what to do with itself.”_

_“I hope they are half so wild as you.”_

_No, she thinks. If he knew her, he would not think so._

_If he knew her, he would know that this is an impossibility. There can never be another woman as wild and brilliant and mad as she._

_*****_

They travel to Tyvia, where the Abbey roofs are glazed with color and the snow catches and melts in Vera’s dark hair. They travel to Morley, walk twisted paths along the cliffs, put on strange accents to hide their Gristol blood, get shaken out of their beds at midnight as a bomb goes off in the room below and they run away laughing with excitement and terror. They sail through mazes of northern glaciers that are sharp and pale as shards of glass, upon southern seas that are the exact same blue as the sky. Once, startled, they watch a whale breach just shy of their ship. It is stranger and grander than anything Vera could have imagined.

Their ship is beset by pirates, and Vera dreams of blood in the water for a month. Her ladies call on her for tea and call her _poor thing_ , whisper how horrible it must have been to watch men die. She does not tell them that she wrenched a charge out of a sailor’s grasp and fired a canon herself, once, because she _wanted_ to, that she’d _loved_ the whir of metal through the air and the thunder of splintering wood.

They return home between trips, as they must, and they throw all the best parties and all the finest dinners. Their manor is splendid and their servants are the best and Preston buys her all the latest fashions. The name _Moray_ is on every tongue in Dunwall.

 _Moray,_ not _Vera._

And after a fortnight or a month or a year, when the city has begun to grow cold and routine again, Preston takes her into the drawing room. Shuts the door. Pours them both tall glasses of cordial and brushes the dust from the globe, spins it with a deft twist of his hands. Around and around and around the Void in the middle. “Where to?”

*****

_Everything foreign is kept in the drawing room. Contained. When visitors first arrive, they are dragged through the ebony double doors and shown all the trinkets from the Morays’ travels – Tyvian masks, Serkonan weavings, Morley furniture, a model of a ship, maps and bones and hunks of rune-encrusted ruin upon the walls._

_There are great beasts mounted upon the walls, as well – whales with spears for noses, Pandyssian antelope as fragile as dolls, a great sleek cat that snarls at the room with teeth as long as Vera’s index finger. Their eyes are bright, frozen glass. As she moves around the room, she can see her reflection in every one._

_The longer they stay in Dunwall between travels, the longer and longer Vera lingers in the drawing room. Dunwall is so grey. She feels as if it sucks the color out of her, turns her into a_ trinket _as well. Late at night, she lights the fire and curls up in a great chair and closes her eyes, listens to the rune and bone hanging upon the walls whisper to her of all the travels she has taken and might take in the days to come._

_Everything foreign is kept in the drawing room, and so of course this is where she brings young Anton Sokolov from the Academy when he asks to paint her. It is not because he is Tyvian. It is because Vera feels like a foreigner in Dunwall, herself. This room is her proper setting. If he wishes to paint her as she truly is, he must understand this. It is necessary._

_This portrait is a necessary thing. She is still half-young, young enough that her hair is still pure black and there are no lines upon her face. Dunwall must remember her this way. Vera deserves and desires to live forever, and this man will see that she does._

_Anton studies the relics on the walls, one by one. He is not like most of the lords and ladies in Dunwall; he looks unimpressed, disinterested. His eyes are dark, and the light in them and the hook of his nose and the way he leans forward put Vera in mind of a great bird of prey._

_“Have you been to the Pandyssian Continent?” he asks._

_His accent is thick, and it takes Vera a second to unravel it. “No,” she answers, startled. “I’ve been asking Preston about it for years.”_

_“You must tell me what you find,” he says._

_No_ when you go. _In the eyes of this young man from beyond Dunwall, the fact that they are_ going _is a given. Everyone says Anton Sokolov is a genius. Therefore, this must be true._

_He paints her, leisurely, over a series of visits that go on far longer than they should. They both enjoy each other’s company. The candles burn low and their glasses run dry. Vera speaks of the wide expanse of the sea and the mysteries that lie on its horizon. Anton speaks of the Academy and the things they discover there. He brings in a book of diagrams and teaches her the names off all the bones of the hand, the muscles that must be peeled away to see them. He translates, painstakingly, one of the carved tablets they transcribed from a cave in Morley, explains that it speaks of songbirds in flight. He tells her of trapping and channeling the sky. He tells her of what lies beyond it._

_When he finishes the portrait, Vera is pleased find that he has painted the light from the window in the shifting blue and violet of his imagined Void._

_*****_

Half the crew goes mad before they reach the cliffs. Preston, for his part, survives by barricading himself in their cabin, taking every splash of spray against their window as the Outsider coming to claim his soul.

“You’ve never been superstitious, dear,” Vera chuckles, sitting cross-legged and unladylike in her narrow bunk. “You’re usually more sacrilegious.”

“Not here.” He runs both hands through his hair so that it stands on end. “Everything’s inverted in Pandyssia. There are places where gravity doesn’t work. Water flows upward. The natives speak of a river basin where you can walk upon the sky.”

“I hope we find it.”

He looks at her. His eyes are wild. Something he sees in her face softens them (Vera does not like this; she likes him sharp, fervent, consuming, as eager for life as her). Preston walks up, and cups her cheek with his hand, and that hand is sun-brown and fit against her skin. “I hope so too.”

The sea licks against their cabin windows and pitches the ship like a child’s ball, and Preston Moray clings to her and whispers promises he can’t possibly keep into her oil-black hair.

He loves her. Dearly. Or, at least, he loves the things she becomes on foreign soil. She is the crown jewel of his collection and more so. She has stood level at his side all across the Isles, scaling cliffs, delving into ruins, their hair wild and their clothes stained with mud and their fingers stained with ink and their eyes alight with discovery; now, as her smile curves against the calluses on his palm, they will see what she becomes when they sail beyond them.

*****

_They meet in his study in the mazelike halls of the Academy, and he spends the first ten minutes making a fool of himself exclaiming that he’s never seen a woman within these walls. Vera Moray sighs, clears a stack of notes from a table, hikes herself up and sits. “I’m leading an expedition to the Continent in a month,” she explains, leaving her husband out of it. “I’ll be travelling to the same region that these carvings are from. I understand you’re an expert on them.”_

_The praise has a startling effect on Dr. Hazian. He goes from flustered to peacock-proud in an instant. “I certainly am.”_

_“Perfect.” Vera points to a drawing of a temple carving that’s hung upon the wall. A figure, split down the middle: one half robed and solid, the other skeletal. Above its head it holds a jewel. The carving is bordered in designs of fire. “Explain?”_

_Dr. Hazian pushes his spectacles up his nose. “There is little to explain. This is a mere primitive carving relating to Outsider worship –”_

_“No, no. Explain it to me as if I were a colleague.”_

_He stares at her. “But…” He flails, inwardly, quietly and obviously. “You’re…”_

_Vera smiles. White teeth. “A respectable_ married _woman, who can ruin your reputation on that count if you don’t humor me.”_

 _A moment goes by. Then two. The timer on the experiment in the next study over goes off. Dr. Hazian adjusts and re-adjusts the spectacles on his nose. “This is not_ seemly” _he complains._

_“No, it isn’t.”_

_He curses and mutters under his breath, but he goes to his desk and pulls out a stack of notes, a sheaf of drawings of the rest of the carvings in the sequence. He lays them out on the table before her in precise, fussy rows. The skeletal figure. The firmament. The blazing fire. The human who is so small in the wake of the divine being before him. “The central theme is rebirth,” he explains, drawing her attention to the way flesh re-forms on the figure’s bones, the triumph in every line. “Renewal. Eternal life.”_

_“Are there other interpretations?”_

_Dr. Hazian snorts. “I don’t want to give you nightmares.”_

_Vera Moray laughs. She laughs and laughs. It is this, she thinks, that makes Dr. Hazian stare at her with something more than horror in and bewilderment in his eyes; that makes him linger a bit overlong when he kisses her hand as she takes her leave._

_(“If you weren’t married,” she imagines he might say, “I would fix this; and I would devote my life to the study of you, and the study of ways to make you live forever as you deserve, and I would give you the lightning from the sky.”)_

_(“If I weren’t married,” she would reply, “I wouldn’t accept. I’m not interested in the sky. It’s empty. It’s boundaries are known. I am interested in the sea.”)_

*****

This is true.

The wind on deck is colder than it should be. Preston takes her hand. As the red cliffs rise on the horizon, he grips it hard enough that his nails leave neat crescents in her palm. Vera glances aside to find that he is grinning.

So is she.

The cliffs of Pandyssia are the color of blood, and they take their toll. A rope _snaps_ and sends one of their guides falling. It’s too quick for him to scream.

The Morays’ other guide mutters a prayer under his breath. The wind takes the words away before Vera can hear them, but she knows what they say. This is not a land where prayers to the Abbey do any good. Below them, the sea hisses against the rocks as if it wishes to whisper secrets into their ear.

Atop the cliffs, two days’ travel down the winding road that follows the path of an old riverbed, they find the first of the whales: bleached, lying on an empty salt flat, the bones frozen in the shape they’d held in life. The sailors mutter curses and do not go near. The native guide who has come to meet them averts his eyes (and in the night they see fires, hear him wailing a dirge that stirs the clouds above). The surviving Gristol guide who traveled with them explains the theory that all of Pandyssia was a sea, long ago; that the sea has encroached and receded upon this land many times. If one dug down into the soil, he says, they would find layers of civilizations bounded by further layers of death and flood.

Preston sits on a rock and sketches the bones in his field journal, dutifully, takes notes in the margins around skull and rib.

Vera is the one to leave the group and walk between them. She toes the line of the creature’s spine. Lifts her hands above her head and strains her fingertips toward upturned ribs. They are so high above her head that she can’t touch them. This does not stop her from trying.

*****

_The bones crunch under her feet. Mouse and fish, bat, bird, tiny white things with limbs thinner than needles and skulls that instantly crumble to powder beneath her heel. So many little lives, so many tiny graves. Vera does not look down. She is dreaming, and so she knows that if she looks down she will see that she’s not crushing the bones of primordial fish but instead the bones of men._

_She keeps one hand light against the wall and follows the line of it down into the dark. This temple is old, and the walls are cool and slick. There are runes against her fingers. She can feel them. So many strange shapes. They are nothing like the cold, categorized sketches in Natural Philosophy books. They twist and change under her touch._

_The soil in Pandyssia is red, red as blood, and it’s in the air until they sleep in white mesh to keep it out of their lungs and their dreams; it’s in her hair, under her nails. Her toes curl into it, dig into the red sand in between the delicate ribs of long-extinct small creatures._

_The soil is wet._

_“There has been no fresh water here,” says a voice in the dark, “for thousands and thousands of years. And now, you.”_

_Vera raises her lantern._

_He is small, slight, and he is smiling. He is dressed like a Gristol whaler or a Pandyssian native or like nothing at all. His eyes are the blackest and most beautiful things that she has ever seen._

_“Moray,” he murmurs, as he steps out of the shadow. Circles her. “You had your pick of a hundred suitors in the Isles and beyond, even the Emperor himself. And you married the man who gave you a name that is all sleekness and teeth in the dark holes under the sea. It seems you’ve chosen well.”_

_Vera Moray smiles. All teeth, indeed. “If you’d offered,” she answers, “I think I’d have chosen you.”_

_“Who’s to say I didn’t?” He takes her hand and spins her, once. In and out like a child’s kite – but then he lets her go free, and she whirls away from him and dances a circular pattern upon the sand before she steadies herself. When she looks down, she finds that her feet have marked out a familiar design in the wet red soil. When she looks back up, he is gone, and his voice fills the cavern around her. “Who’s to say you haven’t?”_

_*****_

The ropes creak as they lower themselves down into the cavern, and the lower they get the more sea their lanterns reveal.

There are many caves like this under the surface of Pandyssia. There are many leagues of underground sea. They have never been mapped. Over breakfast, Preston had spoken of great drowned cities in their depths. Vera had spoken of great whales, bleached white and blind from centuries underground, singing under the surface of the world.

He’d stared at her for a long while, after that.

(She is learning, over the years, that Preston does not understand the depths of her mind; that she is a specimen in his collection, something to be adored and studied. He is a great lover of mysteries, her husband. He loves her because she is something that is always, always new.)

They slide down their ropes into the cave. Preston steps onto the island and helps her down. The underground sea spreads in every direction. “Fossil water,” Preston murmurs. “Look – this place has been unchanged for eons. It’s not even fed by rain. There has been no fresh water here for thousands and thousands of years.”

Something _cracks_ under her foot. Vera looks down to see that she’s stepped upon the wishbone of a prehistoric bird and split it perfectly down the middle. Good luck for the rest of her life. All wishes granted. “And now,” she finishes, “me.”

Preston gives a startled laugh. He murmurs things about her being clever, prideful, precious. He catches her hands in his, laces his fingers fast through hers, and they dance upon the island in the underground sea.

There is no temple to lead her down into the dark; there is no voice whispering in her ear of marriage and adoration. When Vera Moray looks into her husband’s eyes, she is so dismayed to find that they are not as black as the Void. She has to close her own. It takes all her strength to not act on the sudden, mad urge to take Preston’s knife and drive it into his throat. She wishes to do this because it would bring forth a river of blood. She would baptize the sand beneath them with the first true fresh water it has seen in years and years.

*****

_The natives and sailors say she is cursed, and her dear husband frets over the way she grows pale and sleepless and sharp. Vera Moray listens to none of them. She dreams. In her dreams, the fossilized sea is glittering black around them, and the sand upon the island is red, and his hands are cool on hers, and he whispers promises that only he can keep._

_“Moray,” he says. “You chose well. You are_ hungry _. You will become the thing in the cracks that all people fear.”_

_“I thought that was you?”_

_When he laughs, shadows ooze from between his teeth. When they dance, they draw marks upon the sand as he has drawn the marks upon her skin. She returns night after night after night. She kneels before him in the dreaming dark and pledges song and bone and all the proper things. He pulls her to her feet._

_She is not sure who is worshipping who, anymore – only that secrets fall from his mouth like drops of rain, that his mouth upon her is as cool and merciless as the sea and that she sighs, arches, soil smearing her skin; that the name he whispers against her is_ hers _, fully, not her husband’s, nothing but hers. That her cry will hang upon the air down here for eons and eons to come._

 _That when he calls her_ dear, _it echoes upon the unseen walls of the cavern around them. It echoes on the surface of the sea. The surface of that sea is as black as his eyes. She gives the name back to him. Touches his beautiful face an calls him_ dear, dearie, my dear, _just to see those eyes glitter with an eel-toothed smile._

_That she has finally unearthed a treasure of her own._

_“My poor husband wanted my hand so badly,” Vera tells him. “’Marry me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll give you all the world.’ What have you to offer?”_

_*****_

Preston’s hair is white when they finally return from Pandyssia, and his hands shake. The weeks go by. They do not speak of travel. But there comes a day when he touches her elbow and leads her into the drawing room and shuts the great ebony doors behind them.

The stuffed cats and antelopes on the wall stare down at the two of them with eyes of imported glass. The spear-nosed whale stares down at them with eyes of polished jet. Preston does not seem to care. His eyes look at her, only; and there is hope in them, so bright it hurts her to look at.

He wipes the dust from their old globe with a damp cloth, and he spins it between his fragile hands. Vera watches the islands and shorelines whirl by. The Isles, mapped out in dark ink. Pandyssia in shaky, spidery lines. The wide, yellowing expanses of the sea where there is nothing at all. The globe is so frail. Its skin is as thin as an egg. It would be so very, very easy to destroy.

Her husband takes a deep breath. “Where to?”

Vera smiles and shakes her head.

She will never travel again. He has given her all the maps that money can buy. He has given her, ardently, all the world within them. And she has no desire for it, now; for she has given herself in turn to the hollowness inside, the axis, the darkness that keeps it turning.


End file.
